Life: Its True Genesis by R. W. Wright

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When such men as the late Professor Silliman, and Professor Dana, Sen'r,
of Yale College, take up the Bible genesis, and speak in high commendation
of its value to science, it is idle for the Agnostics of that or any other
institution of learning to speak sneeringly of their efforts. They both
know (for the elder Benjamin Silliman "still lives") that the first
command of this genesis was, for the earth to bring forth its vegetation,
not from "seed" distinctively so-called, but from the germinal principles
of life therein; what Ehrenberg calls the "rock-and earth-forming life" or
power of life in matter.

That the second command was, for the waters of the earth to bring forth
their specific forms of life, including the birds; just where science now
asserts they originally came from.

And that the third command was, for the earth to bring forth the beasts
thereof, and every creeping thing thereon. Here the "rock-and
earth-forming" power of life ceased, and the language of the genesis
changes. It is no longer "Let the earth bring forth," but let the Divine
energy intervene!

"Let us (the divine Trinity in Unity) make man in our own image"--after
our own conception of what he should be--the being of two worlds, the
material and spiritual; and man was made accordingly. God breathed into
his nostrils the breath of life, and he became a "living soul." This is
the record--brief, grand, historic. No "evolution," no "involution," no
word without sense or meaning. He who was to have dominion, in his limited
sphere, over all the earth, thus came in due time for a wiser and grander
purpose than man has yet seen; but which, in the providence of God and the
light of His word, he will yet come to see, as scientific truth advances
with the march of religious knowledge. Heaven speed the day when this
millennium of truth shall dawn upon us here!

In this remarkable genesis we have a bridge that spans the chasm between
the man and the anthropoid ape as no other bridge spans it. It is a bridge
over which is flung the living garment of God, and angelic hosts may pass
it to and fro, as well as the master-minds of our own and future ages. It
takes man out of the category of a "beast of the earth," and places him
where all soul-aspiration lifts us--lifts even Robert G. Ingersoll, in his
higher inspirational moods, or will lift him when his extreme material
dogmatisms and false teachings desert him, as we trust they some day will.
Let him read the "Student," by Bulwer, and he will learn how narrowly
Voltaire escaped becoming a "Reformer" in the Church of England, instead
of the violent antagonist he was of the corrupt Church of Rome in France.
We do not make ourselves; it is the environing circumstances and
conditions in which we are placed which oftentimes determine our career
for good or for evil.

We had proposed embodying in this Preface one or two caustic reviews of
our late work, from an Agnostic source, but have been deterred from so
doing, for the reason that we deem it in bad taste as well as irrelevant
at this late day. We shall be pardoned, however, in alluding to _The
National Quarterly Review_, for the captious manner in which it treated us
after we had courteously replied to several inquiries made of us in its
two- or three-page review. After complaining that we had been "hailed, by a
class of callow religious critics, as a 'Savior' from scientific error and
enormities," it charged us with certain unscrupulous methods of
criticism,--such as putting language into Mr. Darwin's mouth that he never
thought of uttering, etc., etc. And as this pretentious Quarterly put
several questions to us, such as "When and where the great Evolutionist
had taught any such doctrine as this?" we ventured to reply as courteously
as we knew how. We endeavored to treat our reviewer fairly, as he had
handsomely accorded to us the credit of "searching the fields of natural
science, lance in hand, to deal hard thrusts at impious skeptics,
materialists, and evolutionists--of which Mr. Darwin and Mr. Bastian fare
the most severely." But we had no thought of using these offensive
adjectives toward either of the distinguished gentlemen named, and did not
so use them; however "unscrupulous" our methods may have been in other
respects. Our reply was unnoticed by the bulky Quarterly, and we were
content with knowing that it was received by its editor, and shared the
fate of all intrusive communications which it is easier to throw into the
waste-basket, especially in hot weather, than to answer in the interests
of science, when such answers are difficult to be made. This was the first
and only discussion we attempted to provoke with our "exhaustive
Reviewers," and it will, in all probability, be the last. Little is gained
by these polemical controversies, when conducted in the spirit of
unfairness, or with greater asperity than the true interests of journalism
demand. The beauty of its kindly advice to us, as a "scientific critic,"
was that every word of it came back, as a cruel boomerang, into the
writer's own face.

But this is enough. For the last three years we have been mostly engaged
in writing another book, the character of which is already sufficiently
indicated in this Preface. The reasons why we have been led to adhere to
our original purpose of making this a "Bible Genesis," as _The National
Quarterly Review_ speaks of it, are best known to our more intimate
friends, and we do not propose to disappoint them in their expectations.

If we have failed to make our theory understood by others, we regret it;
if others fail to understand the inspired text, it is manifestly a matter
for them to regret, and for us to deplore.

To those who have spoken kindly of "Life: Its True Genesis," we return our
thanks: to those who have extended to it their sharpest criticisms, in
what they believe the true interests of science, we also return our
thanks. We have no fear that Truth will be crushed in this contest:

"Truth crushed to earth shall heavenward rise again,
Like wayside flowers that lift their heads, aglow
With a far sweeter fragrance when they've been
All rudely trampled on by hostile foe,
Than when in Flora's gentle arms they've lain
The long night through, and wake at early dawn
To greet Aurora--jewelled queen of morn!"

R. W. Wright.

West Cheshier, Conn., _Oct_. 12, 1883.

Prefatory.

The office of a preface is twofold; first, to introduce the author to the
public; second, to introduce his work. As the writer seeks no personal
introduction, beyond what a favorable or unfavorable reception of his work
may give him, he leaves the more formal, if not formidable branch of
salutation untouched.

The work has cost him some labor, as the reader will see. The field he has
traversed is vast and varied, and the facts he has gathered are numerous
and from many and diversified sources--all bearing more or less
conclusively on the one vital point he seeks to establish, viz: _That the
primordial germs (meaning germinal principles of life) of all living
things, man alone excepted, are in themselves upon the earth, and that
they severally make their appearance, each after its kind, whenever and
wherever the necessary environing conditions exist_.

The foundation of this emphatic formula we find in the Bible Genesis, in
the words given on our title-page, which are more accurately translated in
the Septuagint, than in our common English version of the Old Testament.
The words are to be found in the 11th verse of the first chapter of
Genesis, and the writer confidently believes that they contain the true
Genesis of Life, although entirely overlooked, heretofore, by both the
biblical and scientific scholar.

In the work which he here gives to the public, he will endeavor to show
that all the vital phenomena of our globe, with the single exception
named, find their complete explication in this Genesis of Life; and that
we have only to take the scientific Genesis out of some of its more
imposing categories, to make the two either entirely harmonize, or fall
into the same lines of incidence in human thought.

Science has long taught that the _absence_ of necessary physiological
conditions results everywhere in the _disappearance_ of vital phenomena;
by reversing its logical methods, it will also find that the _presence_ of
these necessary conditions results everywhere in the _appearance_ of vital
phenomena. Take, for instance, the vegetation of Northern Europe, where it
is known that the oak succeeded the pine, and the beech the oak, after
each had held possession of the soil for we know not how many thousand
years. In bringing about the necessary conditions of soil, the pine paved
the way for the oak, and that in turn paved the way for the beech. Neither
sprang from the other, nor did the "selection of the fittest" have
anything to do with the appearance or disappearance of either. Each
yielded fruit "after his kind," whose "seed" (germinal principle of life)
was in itself, i.e., after its own kind, upon the earth, and made its
appearance spontaneously,--that is, without the presence of natural
seed,--whenever the necessary environing conditions favored.

And the same law of vegetal propagation is everywhere operative to-day, in
the alternations of forest growths, the spontaneous appearance of oak
forests where pine have been cleared away, and _vice versa_, in some parts
of the country, where heavy forests of oak timber have been felled. So
with the new growths of timber springing up in the paths of tornadoes,
over large burnt districts, in soils brought up from below the last
glacial drift, and in hundreds of other instances which the reader will
find conclusively verified in these pages,--all making their appearance
without the possible intervention of natural seeds.

The great value of the Septuagint, as compared with other versions of the
Hebrew Bible, will appear from the fact that it is older by many hundred
years than any manuscript copy of the Hebrew text now extant. It was
undoubtedly translated at Alexandria, in Egypt, as early as the third
century before Christ, while the oldest known Hebrew MS. is a Pentateuch
roll dating no further back than A. D. 580. Its translators had before
them much older and more perfect MSS. than any that survived to the time
of the masoretic recension, when an attempt was made to give uniformity to
the readings and renderings of the Hebrew text by means of the vowel
points, diacritical signs, terminal letters, etc., all of which are now
subject to rejection by the best Oriental scholarship.

According to IrenA|us, this Greek version was rendered at the request of
Ptolemy Lagi, in order to add to the treasures of the Alexandrian library,
and it no doubt derived its name from the number of Hebrew and Hellenistic
scholars,--probably the most eminent to be found in that day,--employed
upon the work. The version comes, therefore, with paramount authority to
our own times; and we accept its Greek rendering as the highest and most
conclusive evidence of the authenticity of the text, and the "new genesis
of life" we derive therefrom.

ILIEuroI-II1/4I+- (as contained in the Septuagint) has almost an identical
signification with the Hebrew word ZRA. It means the "_germ_ of anything,"
or the "germinal principle of life," as contained in anything that lives
or grows. No one will claim that it is used in its literal sense of
"seed," in the text. For, when the divine command was issued, there was no
plant or tree, and, presumably, had been none upon the earth from which
seed could have been derived. The word was used in its larger and more
comprehensive (that is, metaphorical) sense, as the "germinal principle of
life in matter," or precisely in the sense in which the Greek stoics used
it in their philosophy. Both Theophrastus and Diogenes use the terms
IfIEuroI muII1/4I+-I"a?1/2II?a1/2 I cubedIOEI cubedI?I expressing "the _laws of generation contained in
matter_"--precisely the meaning we attach to it in its textual
connection. The eleventh verse should read, therefore, as follows: "Let
the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit-tree
yielding fruit after his kind, _whose germinal principle of life, each in
itself after its kind, is upon the earth_"

We accept this rendering of "the seventy," because they had the most
complete and perfect Hebrew MSS. before them, and were no doubt better
scholars, and far more competent renderers of the original text than the
Masorites who came some seven or eight hundred years after them.

But this is not the most important point of inquiry in this connection.
The materialistic objector may say: "Admit all this; grant that the true
rendering is here given; grant even that the true law of vegetal
development and growth is here enunciated; what has 'star-eyed science' to
do with the '_odium theologicum_?'" We answer, nothing. We would bury both
theological rancor and atheistical pretension in the same barrow, and
agree never to "peep and botanize" over their common grave. But if a great
scientific principle--one that fits into all the phenomenal facts of
nature--explains them all, and is, in turn, explained by them--be found in
the Hebrew _Hagiographa_, of what less value is it to science than if it
had been originally enunciated by Aristotle or Plato? Or--to make the
inquiry still sharper and more emphatic--of what less value is it to
science than if it had originally come from Professor Tyndall or Mr.
Herbert Spencer?

Take the "biblical genesis" as we have enunciated and explained it--with
all the facts crowded into these explanatory pages--and science has no
longer any genetic mystery to brood over, further than that every
operation of nature is a mystery into which it is useless for scientific
speculation to pry. We know what nature _does_, or may know it by the
proper scrutiny, but we shall never know the causes of things, any more
than we shall find God at the bottom of Herbert Spencer's crucible, or at
the top of his ladder of synthesis. In the light of the Bible genesis,
science can account for the origin of the stalwart oak or the lordly pine,
without going back to any mycological or cryptogamic forms, to follow down
an ever-changing vital plexus that is as likely to land in a buttonwood
tree as an oak, or in a hemlock as a pine,--in fact, quite as likely to
land in a carnivorous animal as in an insectivorous plant. "Let the earth
bring forth," is still the eternal fiat,--just as implicitly obeyed to-day
as it was in the world's primeval history, when an exuberance of
endogenous vegetation laid the foundation of the coal measures. It
requires no greater effort on the part of nature to produce the pine, the
oak, the beech, the hickory--all of which we see springing directly from
primordial germs to-day--than it did to produce the lowest vegetal
organism, from an invisible, indestructible "vital unit," or Darwinian
gemmule, thousands of years ago.

He who is the same yesterday, to-day, and forever, and in whose sight a
thousand years are but as yesterday, knows no such "law of variability" as
our materialistic friends have been spinning for us in their unverified
theories of evolution, natural selection, selection of the fittest,
rejection of the unfit--force-correlations, molecular machinery,
transmutation of physical forces, differentiation, dynamical aggregates,
_molA(C)cules organiques_, potentiated sky-mist, undifferentiated
"life-stuff," and other hylotheistic and purely hypothetical formulA|,
with which the average mind has been well-nigh crazed for the last fifteen
or twenty years.

Believing that the time has come to call for "a halt" in scientific
speculations, and a return to the phenomenal facts of nature as the true
and only basis on which to formulate the immutable laws of life, matter,
motion, etc., the writer submits this volume with trustful confidence to
the public. [1]

R. W. Wright.

West Cheshire, Conn.

True Genesis.

Chapter I.

Introductory.

It is undeniably true that the progress of scientific thought and
speculative inquiry, both in this country and in Europe, is rapidly
tending towards a purely materialistic view of the universe, or one that
utterly excludes the ancient and long-predominating metaphysical
conceptions of Life, to say nothing of the more regnant and universally
prevailing conception of a God. And it is quite as undeniable that the
current of experimental research and investigation is setting, with equal
rapidity, in the same direction. According to the views of many of our
more advanced chemists, physiologists, and other scientific and
speculative writers and thinkers--those whose experimental investigations
have, it is claimed, reached the ultimate implications of all material
substance--there are but two immutable, indestructible, and thoroughly
persistent elements in the universe--_Matter_ and _Motion_. Everything
else, they confidently assert, is either purely phenomenal, or else
essentially mutable, ephemeral, transitory. Force, according to their
theory, is only another name for motion or its correlates, and, hence, the
two terms are interchangeably used by them in predicating their ultimate
conclusions respecting matter.

Light, heat, electricity, magnetism, chemical affinity, molecular force,
and even life itself, are only so many manifestations or expressions, they
claim, of one and the same force in the universe--_Motion_, With the
exception of matter, it is the only self-persistent, permanently enduring,
ever active and reactive agency.

Light, they say, is dependent, heat conditional, electricity and magnetism
more or less phenomenal, chemical affinity and molecular force mere modes
or correlated forms of motion, and all-pervading life itself a mere
postulate of the schools, or at best only the result of the dynamic force
of molecules.

Deem not this collocation simply a burlesque on Scientific categories.
Professor Bastian, in his great work on the "Beginnings of Life," has
unhesitatingly said: "The 'vitalists' must give up their last
stronghold--we cannot even grant them a right to assume the existence of a
special 'vital force' whose peculiar office it is to effect the
transformation of physical forces. The notion that such a force does
exist, is based on no evidence; it is a mere postulate. The assumption of
its existence carries with it nothing but confusion and contradiction,
because the very supposition that it exists, and does so act, is totally
averse to the general doctrine of the correlation of forces."

And this defiant challenger of the "vitalists," who thus half-sneeringly
speaks of those who believe that the vital forces of the universe are
among the highest potential factors expressed therein, is one who, for the
last decade and a half, has mostly lived in the ephemeromorphic world, and
who, in diving into the "beginnings of life," has so far lost his way that
the all-glorious end of it is as much an inexplicable mystery to him now,
as when he was more successfully expounding pathological anatomy and
ruthlessly hacking away at anatomical subjects over the dissecting-slab of
the London University College. Had he spent less time over this
dissecting-slab, and more in studying the marvellous manifestations of
life in its outspoken beauty of leaf, bud, flower, fruit--things of not
mere guess and fancy--he would undoubtedly have had a higher appreciation
of what is most vital in nature, and less of what is simply material in a
non-functional sense. With Mr. Herbert Spencer, he gratuitously sneers at
the "old specific-creation hypothesis," or the divine fiat in the
beginning; but without that fiat, where would he find his ephemeromorphs?
or even the dead tissues used in his organic infusions for the vainest of
all human endeavors--that of producing life, or seeking to produce it, _de
novo_? He is so immeasurably disgusted with the vitalists that he hardly
allows himself to speak of "life" or even use the term "vital" as applied
to its simplest manifestations, without quotationizing them as terms to
provoke both incredulity and derision.

The world may, however, overlook much of this in him, in view of his past
professional pursuits, as well as in consideration of his eminent services
as a specialist in science. The dissecting-room of a university is not the
most desirable place in the world for profoundly studying the vital forces
of nature. It is too grim and ghastly a repository of dead men's skulls,
and "holes where eyes did once inhabit," in which to regard "life's
enchanting cup" as one sparkling to the brim. Detaching a muscle here, and
laying bare another there; taking out a sightless eye in one subject, and
putting the dissecting-knife deep into the pulseless heart of another;
cutting the fragments of a human body into shreds and tatters over one
dissecting-slab, and loading down another with splintered bones and
mangled hands and limbs, is not exactly the sort of occupation to enkindle
the highest enthusiasm for "life," in any of its more manifold phases in
nature. Too many lifeless notions get crammed into the head--to say
nothing of baffled endeavor in the pursuit--to admit of the more
conclusive and satisfactory inductions respecting living organisms.

But why should an assumption of the existence of life carry with it any
greater "confusion and contradiction," than a like assumption respecting
either matter or motion? Simply because the materialists insist, in their
logical inductions, upon so distributing the terms of their syllogism that
only a negative conclusion shall follow.

"Matter and motion," they say, are alone indestructible.

Life is neither matter nor motion,

Therefore: Life is not indestructible.

This syllogism is manifestly unanswerable, if there be no fallacy in the
distribution of its major and minor terms. But wherein lies the
incompatibility of reversing the order of its terms, so as to prove that
neither matter nor motion is indestructible? And would such a judgment,
thus derived, be any more spurious, the process of reasoning any more
illicit, or the conclusion any less unanswerable? We might as well say
that neither matter nor motion is an absolute entity in the universe,
without some apprehensive intelligence, or rational intuition therein, to
embrace them as distinct concepts or objects of thought; nor can either
have the least conceivable attribute without some co-existing intelligence
to ascribe it. For to ascribe an attribute, is to conceive or think of
such attribute. And as our general conceptions are conceded to be
realities, even by the materialists themselves, it necessarily follows
that this conscious _ego_--this thing that conceives, thinks, ascribes
attributes--is either co-existent with matter, or else antedates it in the
order of existence. And here--at this identical point in the argument--we
are irresistibly forced back, in our inductive processes, to the
theological conception of a God--the one supreme _Ego_ of the
universe--from whom alone all our intuitions of consciousness, as well as
apprehensive intelligence, is derived.

We can no more get rid of these inductive processes than we can change the
order of nature or reverse the inevitable laws of thought. Hence, we are
constantly driven to formulate the following, or some equivalent
inductions:--

1. Cause must exist before effect.

2. Without some vital principle, therefore, preA"xisting as a cause, there
can be no life-manifestation.

3. But there can be no life-manifestation without organic structure.

4. The reverse of this proposition is also true.

5. Which, therefore, precedes the other as a cause, and which follows as
an effect?

6. Nothing can organize itself. To do so, it must contain within itself
both the operating cause and the resulting effect, which is at once an
incongruent and conflictive judgment.

7. But the thing that organizes must exist before the thing organized,
whether it be a vital principle or an intelligent agency.

8. Hence Life, either as a preA"xisting cause or vital agency, must precede
both animal and vegetal organism.

Again:--

9. Cause is that which operates to produce an effect, as effect is that
which is produced by an operating cause.

10. But whatever operates to produce a life-manifestation must precede it
as an operating cause.

11. Life, therefore, whether as a blind or intelligent force or agency,
must precede its own manifestation; that is, must exist as an operating
cause before there is any produced effect.

12. And this is true both as regards physical and moral effects.

13. Our intuitions, as the final arbiters of judgment, demand this or some
equivalent order as the only one embraced in a logical praxis.

And since there can be no sound without an ear to appreciate it, so there
be can no matter without an existing _ego_, in some state of consciousness
in the universe, to apprehend it--to ascribe to it attributes.[2] On what,
therefore, are we to predicate the existence of either matter or motion,
except it be these intuitions of consciousness whose validity, so far as
we have any knowledge whatever on the subject, rests exclusively on that
"breath of life," which was breathed into man when he became a living
soul? But if our intuitions are not realities, then nothing is a reality.
All is as unsubstantial, as vague and shadowy, as Coleridge's "image of a
rock," or Bishop Berkeley's "ghost of a departed quantity," as he once
defined a fluxion. We may, therefore, retort upon Professor Bastian:--The
"materialists," must give up their last stronghold--we cannot even grant
them a right to assume the existence of either matter or motion, since
both manifestly depend, for their slightest manifestation, upon the more
potent agency of "vital force," as expressed in thought, volition, and
consciousness--that triumvirate of the intellectual faculties without
which neither matter nor motion could have so much as a hypothetical
existence.

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